Comic strips

Pooch Cafe collection becomes graphic novel

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Alan Gardner October 17, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

Last year Pooch Cafe creator Paul Gilligan did a reboot of sorts taking his character Poncho back to year one. He’s now compiled all of those strips into a book. What’s interesting about the book is that it’s not a straight compilation. He’s reworked some of the punchlines so that it fits a more sequential story-line.

Here’s how Paul describes the process:

I made sure every panel in the Year One opus was of equal size, so that when it was complete I’d be able use it as a framework, a series of puzzle pieces that I could move about and add to or subtract from. Being a daily strip required a joke, or at minimum a story beat, at each 4th-square juncture, and this would at times breed a punchline that was incongruous with the story flow. I knew when I morphed it into a graphic novel I would have to jettison such panels, and many others. In fact I wanted to discard the 4-panel rhythm entirely so that I could remove unwanted panels and add new ones – some 150 of them – to create a different experience.”

You can see more of the book over at Amazon.